Myself and Alan Renouf from the Get-Scripting Podcast will be presenting this month at the UK Powershell User Group on Thursday 26th March at Microsoft in Reading.
First up on the night will be Richard Siddaway talking to us about using Regular Expressions in Powershell. This was requested at a previous event and I know that Richard is really looking forward to talking about that subject ;-)
Then the Get-Scripting guys will take over:
Today’s UK VMware User Group was a great community content event. Of course there was a sponsor presentation (Veeam) without whom these type of events can’t be put on, but there were also a lot of contributions from people in the group.
We had:
Veeam talking about their reporting and backup products.
Mike Laverick from RTFM education talking about Site Recovery Manager and not the VMware view of it, rather real world struggles - warts and all as he put it.
Whilst monitoring some newly provisioned Citrix servers running on VMware hosts today, I soon became very bored with manually checking how many sessions were on each Citrix VM as the load on each one increased, whilst trying to get it to the optimum level.
I knew it was possible to use Powershell to connect with Citrix servers, but had never really looked into it before. Not surprisingly it turned out to be very straightforward.
Don’t forget 7pm GMT on Thursday February 26th sees Rolf Masuch presenting a Live Meeting to the UK PowerShell User group. Rolf runs the German PowerShell User Group.
Session abstract:
PowerShell as Active Directory Login Script Loginscript, why? The Script Draft in the form editor Start with PowerGUI Editor The script skeleton The script details Get in running Output of information Formatting of the information Putting the script on the server The path on the domain controller Setting the users login script Running .
As promised to those who attended the MMMUG on Wednesday night my slides from that evening are available on my SkyDrive.
Enjoy.
At last week’s UK Powershell Usergroup Jonathan Noble was showing us some Powershell examples and at one point demonstrated something similar to the below.
Essentially you create an empty array, but then somewhat surprisingly (well to me anyway) you can select some elements even though they don’t exist! You are then able to add to the array using the names you have selected.
$MYInfo = "" | select-Object Name, CPUUsage,Owner, ProcessID $MYInfo.
Coming up in February are two events for the UK Powershell User Group.
Following the Technet Event Managing Windows Servers with Powershell V2 on Feb 10th at Microsoft London there will be a Powershell UserGroup meeting. My good friend Jonathan Noble will be travelling down all the way from the North of England to present for us about using Powershell to automate tasks in the large University environment he works in - well worth turning up for.
One regular task for Exchange admins can be reclaiming free space within Exchange mailbox stores either after a large amount of data has been removed or just a significant amount has built up over time for various reasons. For those of you who don’t know, to reclaim the space the mailbox store has to be taken offline and the database defragged to get the space back on the disk.
Finding good candidates for defragging especially in a large environment with multiple databases and Exchange servers can be a pretty tedious task.
So I was lucky enough to receive an invite from Nathan Winters who runs the MM&M User Group UK (aka Exchange) to present at their next meeting on Wednesday 18th February at Microsoft in London.
It will be an evening around using Powershell to manage Exchange, the agenda is as below:
18:15 - 18:40 Arrival
18:40 - 18:45 Introduction to speakers and the aims of the group
18:45 - 19:30 1st session; Jonathan Medd, Introduction to PowerShell and Using PowerShell to manage Exchange 2003!
…i.e. a budget of £0.
(Update 28/01/09 - FYI..got some feedback about this post and the reason we are not using the built in alerts in the VI client is because the CPU alerts in this case were not granular enough for us.)
So this all stemmed from trying to track down which process was causing particular servers’ CPU to hit 100% for a period. So first of all my colleague and Get-Scripting co-host Alan Renouf traded a script back and forth which ended up as the CheckHighCPU function - it is now pretty cool and comes back with a list of processes sorted by how much CPU they are using and very importantly for our circumstance who is the owner of each process.